About a dozen businesses and residents located in and around Seattle’s autonomous protest zone sued the city Wednesday — arguing their constitutional rights to property are being violated.
The so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which sprouted up on June 8, has been “unchecked by police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public at large,” the lawsuit said.
While the plaintiffs would like to restore normalcy to the area, they stressed in the suit that the legal action was not meant to undermine the protest’s anti-police brutality and Black Lives Matter messaging.